Who Needs a Pay Phone in 2025?
Pay phones are back? No, not in a hipster, ironic, “I only listen to vinyl and churn my own butter” kind of way. A man in rural Vermont is actually…
Front view of a pay phone next to an empty rural road.
Pay phones are back?
No, not in a hipster, ironic, “I only listen to vinyl and churn my own butter” kind of way.
A man in rural Vermont is actually installing free pay phones across the countryside like it's 1989.
The guy’s name is Vincent. He’s not doing it for profit or nostalgia—he just thinks everyone deserves a way to call home, especially in the many rural Vermont dead zones where your phone signal goes to die, presumably next to your dreams of 5G and Uber Eats.
Honestly, I can’t even remember the last time I used a pay phone.
Maybe to call my mom to pick me up from the mall, or to phone a friend when “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire” made it cool. But I distinctly remember one time during my senior year at UMass Amherst, when a pay phone literally saved my life—or at least saved me from becoming a Dateline episode.
I went on a date with a guy I worked with at Ruby Tuesday’s in the Holyoke Mall. (Yes, I had flair.) He seemed nice-ish. Took me to dinner. Then told me he had to “swing by a friend’s house in Springfield.”
Spoiler alert: it was to buy drugs. Naturally, a fight broke out, and I ran—literally RAN—down the street in my chunky Steve Maddens, found a random pay phone, and called my roommate to come rescue me from the middle of nowhere.
No cell phone. No GPS. Just me and questionable judgment.
So honestly? Power to you, Vincent the Pay Phone Guy. Maybe the next Ruby Tuesday’s waitress in peril will stumble across one of your throwback booths and live to tell her blog-worthy tale, too.
Long live the pay phone. And even longer live my 20-year-old self for surviving that Springfield situation with nothing but guts, heels, and a handful of quarters
